I don’t often write about transitioning as a non-binary person. Mostly because it’s actually painfully boring. Today I stood in the pharmacy staring at bottles of diabetic cough suppressant for 20 minutes because some insurance software was down. Laser hair removal is just that awkward semi-silence of dentist’s office — of someone trying to pretend you’re not really there while clinically going over parts of your body with dangerous equipment. Except sometimes your nipples hurt. It’s mostly that sort of thing, repeated every couple weeks, mixed with occasional anxiety over vocal training. Yeah, I got depression. Buddy, we all got depression.
None of which prepared me for my latest mundane dilemma, however, which is that I need to pee. Like, all the fucking time. And it’s making it really difficult to play some of the biggest games before the end of the year.
The issue stems from the fact that I doubled my dosage of spironolactone a few months ago. “Spiro” is a blood pressure medication more familiar to trans women and non-binary folks as a testosterone blocker. I’ve been taking it in comparatively small doses for more than a year now, since my endocrinologist doesn’t really know what to do with me: someone who isn’t a trans woman but undergoes feminizing hormone replacement therapy with the end goal of looking more androgynous.
Spiro is also a diuretic, which many trans women can tell you from experience. Boy does that part suck shit. Especially right now.
It’s winter here where I live. That means cold, snow, and usually vacation time for me to cozy up and chew through my backlog of games. Some of us here at Fanbyte don’t worry much about that sort of thing. But I get a certain chemical satisfaction when I “cross off” games, books, etc. from my list of lived experiences. Doubly so at the end of the year. I like to cuddle up under blankets and experience the illusion of “progress” through an exponentially growing slurry of human creation. It’s comforting to me, in the same hypnotic, repetitive school as shooting hoops in the driveway. Everybody’s got stuff like that.
The cuddling, however, has become part of the problem. As my tits expand and my bladder shrinks, my two oversized felines have decided now is the perfect time to become lap cats. My 18-pound cinnamon rolls spent most of their lives up to this point as needy, screaming terrors. They do not want pets. They do not want to play with their toys. They just want to yell and wrestle and bite and try to push things off my desk. All of that still happens, of course, but now that winter has rolled around — my cozy time for burning backlog — Ramba and Canti also like to siphon every last bit of warmth from my thighs. And feet. And crotch and shoulders. Ramba in particular isn’t picky, just continuously demanding.
Combine that with my new, constant need to get up and go. Playing marathon games like Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous, once a relaxing way for me to hyper-fixate and feel that much more connected to the human races, has become an Olympic ordeal. I’m at my PC all day — working here at Fanbyte and engaging in my other favorite pastime, writing internet smut for AO3. The last thing I wanna do afterwards is sit and play games in my office. So I’ve taken to using my Steam Link, that abandoned little box from Valve Software, to beam Pathfinder, Stellaris, and a few other Big Games to my couch. This unfortunately makes me an even easier target for cats looking to nap on top of me.
The hormone shit alone would get me stopping and starting three times an hour. Now an extra quarter of that is spent pushing off grumbling cats and lifting my blanket so they can go back to sleep under the covers with me. Or I can suffer, as so many cat owners suffer and just hold it while they stretch their little paws over my blanket and look too cute for me to move them. There is no perfect solution. This is my new hell.
It’s also a totally banal kind of hell. That’s the stuff I find hardest to anticipate and prepare for as I continue to take my vitamins and watch my body change. It’s still totally worth it, of course, as I feel more comfortable in my own skin than ever before. The recurring discomfort is sickly comforting in its own way. It presents a very tangible, comprehensible problem stemming from my gender and the accompanying HRT. It’s something I can wrap my head around — rather than the endless death parade of headlines quoted tweeted onto my timeline, hinting at the many new ways the United States would like to destroy people like me. I know it fucking sucks out there. Buddy, I just wanna drink water again.
